Social Support for Mobile Security: Comparing Close Connections and Community Volunteers in a Field Experiment

People regularly rely on social support from family, friends, and the public when mitigating security and privacy risks, even if mainstream technologies hardly support these interactions. In this paper, we evaluated Meerkat, a mobile application that allows users to receive support through screenshot capturing, marking, and messaging. In a field experiment (n = 65), we tested how Meerkat helps users face phishing attempts and examined it by receiving help from close social connections and community volunteers. Our findings show that while users could learn from both types of helpers, they were significantly more willing to rely on advice from close connections. We evaluate several criteria for successful support interactions, showing that learning is significantly correlated with specific properties of the support interaction, such as the length of the messages. We conclude the paper by discussing how our findings can be used to design community-based applications.